ABSTRACT
With the passing of the binding force of latency–obsessionality, and of the holding function of the family, comes the dispersal, or splitting up, of the self—a function that requires an alternative group structure to hold together those parts of the self and to prevent further fragmentation. There may also be a safety-in-numbers dimension to the group formation. It can function as protection from the fears of isolation that are so often an accompaniment to the confusion of those new and bewildering feelings that can frequently accost the young teenager with a sense of being "unlike the others". During the transition the adolescent group may be seen as performing a second-skin holding function. It is a period when old infantile conflicts have to be worked over again in the light of new, intense genital drives which test the quality of the internalisation of previous object-relations and identifications.
